The arrest of a well-known Dream Act activist’s mother and brother this week has sparked an outcry among activists who say the case spotlights a disconnect between President Barack Obama’s policies and the immigration officers responsible for enforcing them.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Maria Arreola, the mother of nationally known 24-year-old activist Erika Andiola, on Thursday night at the family’s Mesa home, apparently acting on a deportation order from 1998.

Andiola’s brother, Heriberto Andiola Arreola, 35, was outside the home at the time and could not provide identification when officers asked. He was arrested after he refused to answer whether he was in the country illegally.

Maria Arreola was placed on a deportation bus headed for Nogales on Friday morning, but the bus was ordered to turn around, and she was released Friday afternoon.

While both Arreola and her son are in the country illegally, immigration lawyers and advocates say their arrests contradict policies established over the last two years by the Obama administration.

Those policies include a program that allows young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children stay in the country and work temporarily.

Another change directs ICE officials to place priority on arresting, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants who are deemed dangerous because of their criminal backgrounds rather than going after those with clean records and long ties to the U.S.

Obama has said the changes are intended to provide protection against deportation for many long-term undocumented immigrants until Congress achieves his goal of passing immigration reforms that include a legalization program for the nation’s 11million undocumented immigrants.

Even with the changes, the federal government deported a record 409,849 immigrants during the last fiscal year.

Andiola is a founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, a group that advocates for federal legislation allowing young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to legalize their status.

In July 2012, Andiola drew national attention when Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a main proponent of the Dream Act, held up a large color poster of her on the Senate floor while describing how she had managed to graduate with honors with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Arizona State University despite being an illegal immigrant.

She drew national attention again on Thursday when she reported the arrests of her mother and brother in a tearful YouTube video, which prompted a national outcry on Twitter and other social media.

After being detained for several hours, Andiola’s brother was released by ICE about 6a.m. Friday, and her mother was released about 12:30p.m., according to their lawyer, Jose Luis Penalosa.

Penalosa said he is certain the attention generated by Andiola’s supporters prompted ICE to release her mother and brother.

“It had everything to do with it,” Penalosa said. “Most people would have been taken out in a heartbeat.”

At a rally Friday evening outside
ICE’s detention center in Phoenix where just hours earlier she had been held in custody, Maria Arreola described how she was already on an ICE bus headed to Nogales to be deported when the driver abruptly turned around after receiving a phone call and drove her back to Florence. She was later brought back to the detention center in Phoenix and released.

Penalosa said Arreola was issued an “order of supervision” that allows her to remain in the country for one year while her case is resolved. The order was signed by ICE officials in Washington, D.C., indicating the decision to release her was made at the highest levels of the agency.

Penalosa said the detention of Andiola’s mother and brother highlights how ICE officials in the field continue to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants with no criminal records, separating families in the process, despite the Obama administration’s attempt to provide relief from deportation to some undocumented immigrants through administrative changes.

Penalosa said the record numbers of deportations that have taken place every year since Obama took office are the result of policies put into place under former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

“The bureaucracy is flowing,” Penalosa said. “You are not going to stop that until there is immigration reform.”

Immigrant advocates around the country used the arrests of Andiola’s mother and brother to renew calls for Congress to pass immigration reform this year.

“These are not isolated incidents,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C. “This happens every day in every city but they are not in the spotlight. ... This is what 400,000 deportations looks like.”

Immigrant advocates also used the case to remind Obama that he was re-elected with the help of overwhelming support from Latino voters.

After being re-elected with more than 70percent of the Latino vote, Obama said passing immigration reform will be his top priority this year, but other issues including gun control and spending cuts to reduce the deficit have already threatened to upstage immigration reform.

“We have a check to cash for the millions of Latinos who came out to vote,” Daniel Rodriguez, an Arizona State University law student and member of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, said during the rally in support of Andiola’s family.

ICE officials in Phoenix would not comment on what led officers to detain Andiola’s mother and brother in the first place.

Andiola said she believes ICE may have targeted her family in retaliation for her work advocating for illegal immigrants, a charge ICE officials disputed.

She said ICE officers came to her house about 9p.m. Thursday and asked for her mother.

She said ICE officers took her mother away in handcuffs. As they were leaving, ICE officers spotted her brother outside and asked him for his identification.

She said when her brother said he was not carrying any, the officers began asking him if he was undocumented. She said the ICE officers arrested him after he refused to answer any questions about his immigration status.

In a statement, ICE spokeswoman Amber Cargile said the two were released after an initial review of their cases showed they met ICE’s policy for prosecutorial discretion, even though one of them had previously been removed from the country.

“A fuller review of the cases is currently ongoing,” Cargile said in the statement. “ICE exercises prosecutorial discretion on a case-by-case basis, considering the totality of the circumstances in an individual case.”

Penalosa said the case apparently stems from an outstanding deportation order from 1998 when Maria Arreola attempted to enter the U.S. illegally through a port of entry in Arizona.

The deportation order likely came to ICE’s attention after Arreola was stopped for speeding by Mesa police in September and her fingerprints were run through an immigration database as part of an ICE program known as Secure Communities.

ICE has teams of officers that routinely go out and pick up immigrants with deportation orders identified through the program.

After the traffic arrest, Andiola posted videos on YouTube of her mother being questioned by police. Afterward, she accused Mesa police officers of racial profiling under a provision of the state’s immigration-enforcement law, Senate Bill 1070, which the courts allowed to take effect a few days before her mother’s arrest.

Penalosa said the postings may have angered Mesa police.

However, Detective Steve Berry, a spokesman for the Mesa Police Department, said Friday that the claim was not true.

“There were no calls from Mesa asking for any kind of enforcement action in this case,” he said. “It’s not something we did in this case, nor in any case.”

Meanwhile, Andiola was celebrating the release of her mother and brother.

She told supporters that after ICE took her mother and brother away, she “felt guilty” because she was afraid they were going to be deported as the result of her role as an activist.

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